Getting fitter at day care

Centers join an effort to help children get more exercise and eat healthful food

It may have been the easiest cold call in history.

Two weeks ago, a personal trainer called Creative Kidz Academy in North Raleigh to pitch a 12-week training program aimed at small fry. Instead of a day-care worker frazzled by trying to keep up with energetic ankle biters, he found a surprisingly receptive ear.

"We get marketing calls every day," says Christy Lowery, owner of the center, people wanting to sell everything from snack foods to playground equipment. "If he had called a year ago, we wouldn't even have considered it."

What's happened in the past year is that Creative Kidz has gotten some health and fitness religion, thanks to a program developed by the UNC Center for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention that aims to instill healthy habits in kids as early as possible.

The program is called NAP SACC -- the Nutrition and Physical Activity Self-Assessment for Child Care -- and it's aimed not so much at the kids themselves, but at the folks many of them spend most of their time with: day-care providers.

"We work with them to help them better understand nutritional planning, physical activity, those kinds of things," says Pam Dowdy, executive director of Wake County Smart Start, which administers the program locally. About 30 of the county's nearly 270 day-care centers are taking part in the five-year-old program, which is also being offered in nine other North Carolina counties.

In the case of Creative Kidz, it was a cold call a year earlier that first got them thinking healthy. And again, it was another serendipitously receptive ear that made things happen.

"I'd been going through some health issues at home when Krista called," says Lowery. "So I was willing to give it a try.

Krista is Krista Barbour, a counselor with Smart Start focused on the NAP SACC program. The Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina Foundation had awarded a $240,000 grant for the program, targeted at three-star day-care centers, and she was trolling for interested centers.

Barbour had Lowery and her staff fill out a self-assessment addressing 14 areas ranging from what the center served for lunch to what the kids did for exercise when it rained. From that, Barbour made an action plan for the center.

"These are the big key areas we can work on first, " she says, "in the first six months or so."

"We started making changes immediately," says Allyson Heath, the center's director.

Among them:

• Replacing whole milk with 1 percent. "A lot of people don't realize that after age 2, children don't need whole milk," says Penny Faulkner with Wake County Human Services.
• Swapping fresh fruit for the sugary canned variety. "We used to get one case of fresh fruit a week," says Lowery, "now we get five or six." And the kids are learning to eat such "exotic" fruits as plums and kiwis.
• More water, less juice. "We used to just have the water fountain," says Lowery, and apple juice on demand. Water is now available in the rooms and juice is offered once a day. Notes Faulkner: "Four ounces of juice a day is the recommendation."
• Swapping fried foods -- such as fish sticks or chicken nuggets -- with grilled or baked items. The former have been eliminated entirely, says Lowery, and they've even gotten the kids to eat baked fish (though, she notes, "They think it's chicken").
• Rotating menus. "We used to have four basic menus," Lowery says. Now, it may be a couple of weeks or more before a menu repeats, adding variety for the kids.
• Cookies for snacks have been replaced by more healthful alternatives, such as apple slices dipped in yogurt.